LIGHTS, CAMERAS, RUSSIAN!

When Vincent Fandetti was a little kid growing up in a big family, he used to peddle vegetable seeds door to door to earn money so he could buy a camera.

He still has some of the pictures he snapped with his simple camera back in the '40s, but he was never able to turn his obsession into a job.

Instead, he went to radio broadcasting school. But he couldn't get a job in that field, either, so at age 19 he joined the Army and learned how to weld.

Welding served him well, Fandetti says, giving him a 35-year stint at Pratt & Whitney, allowing him to pursue a pastime as a competitive runner and to retire at age 58.

"Say what you will about the Army, it taught me a trade and got me a career and a house," says Fandetti, who's now 69 and lives in Glastonbury with his wife, Winifred. In their home are more than 2,000 pictures he's taken of Winifred, along with scrapbooks full of pictures and stories of victories in the more than 600 races he's run.

Finally, nine years ago, Fandetti got a job in a field closer to his true calling, although it necessitated a technological leap of some distance, a unique work schedule, a daunting concentration level and a tolerance of listening to teenagers struggling to learn Russian.

Each weekday from 1:20 to 2:06 p.m., Fandetti runs the cameras that deliver Glastonbury High School language teacher Lynne Campbell's Russian I class to students in Newington and South Windsor.

The two cameras, affixed high on the walls of Campbell's classroom, must track the teacher and her movements precisely, and that's the task Fandetti has been hired to do for $12.50 an hour.

He's never late, he never calls in sick and "we absolutely depend on him. He's more than 100 percent responsible ... a great guy, just a great guy," says Glastonbury High School Principal Alan Bookman, who hired Fandetti and was instrumental in bringing distance learning to Glastonbury and schools in five other nearby towns.

By using Cox Cable's public access channel, the schools in the towns served by this cable franchise -- Glastonbury, Manchester, South Windsor, Newington, Wethersfield and Rocky Hill -- can exchange classes.

Glastonbury is offering Russian, but it's also getting via television Japanese and other courses.

Grants allowed the Glastonbury school system to buy the equipment it needed to get into distance learning, including the televisions, the cameras, a control box, a monitor, the microphones on each desk and the one clipped onto Campbell, and the touch pad Fandetti uses to control the cameras.

All Glastonbury pays is Fandetti's salary -- "a real bargain" as far as Bookman is concerned.

So dependent is he on Fandetti's one-hour-a-day service to the school, Bookman tells Fandetti he can't retire until he himself does.

"That'll make me 75," says Fandetti, who figures he'll be pretty fluent in Russian by that time.

"This requires an incredible commitment by the schools. There's a lot involved and a big commitment by us, too," says Cynthia Marler, education coordinator for Cox Communication Inc., which provides the air time and technical support.

Marler monitors the classes on the air to make sure they're running smoothly. While there are technical glitches -- for instance, a car smacks into a telephone pole and pulls down the cable wires or a storm rolls through town, messing up communications -- she finds Campbell's Russian classes professionally run.

Moving To TV

Fandetti came to this unusual gig when he retired.

Keeping in mind his love of taking pictures and his early interest in broadcasting, he volunteered to run a video camera at local town meetings for Cox to air on public access. Cox taught him how to use the camera, and a year or so later told him about a possible job at the high school.

For Fandetti and Campbell, producing a daily television program was a pretty scary experience at first.

Campbell, who's been teaching languages for 27 years, had to learn how to be the host of a television program teaching students in her class as well as those in the classrooms at other schools, who appear on the screen in the front of her room.

In this year's Russian class, for instance, there are about a dozen kids in the Glastonbury class, four more in South Windsor and one in Newington. At the same time they appear on the Glastonbury screens, Campbell and her students appear on televisions in their classrooms.

It's a hard job for Campbell and not an easy one for Fandetti, who must make sure the show's star is front and center at all times for the students in the other schools.

"If they can't see her, or see what's she doing, they won't know what's going on," says Fandetti, who must keep as tight a focus on Campbell as possible, yet still include her hand gestures and all the other aids she uses to teach Russian.

Campbell makes much use of an overhead projector, which this day is magnifying newspaper and magazine pictures she's cut out for all her students to see so they can take an informal quiz, writing down in Russian what the pictures depict. Fandetti does the same because, he figures, "I'd be pretty much of a dummy if I didn't learn Russian along with the kids."

"I was just a wreck in the beginning," recalls Campbell.

"We were both green," says Fandetti, but together they've learned, switching a couple of years ago from video cameras to the monitor system, which required learning even more new technology.

But one plus has been decorum in the classroom. On the wall above the televisions are signs warning the kids that they're on the air.

"Mind Your TV manners," instructs one, while another says: "All of your conversations are BROADCAST to the entire Glastonbury community."

Actually, they are broadcast to the entire franchise area, though no one knows how many franchise subscribers at home may be tuning into a Russian I class at 1:20 in the afternoon. Enough of them, though, to make Campbell a local celebrity and to give her an excuse to buy more clothes than she might ordinarily.

"People stop me all the time and say, 'I saw you on television.' I tell my husband, 'I'm on television. I have to go shopping at Talbot's,' " says Campbell.

The students, however, don't seem to notice the cameras.

"The technology doesn't knock their socks off like it does ours," says Campbell, although Fandetti reminds her of one student some years ago who refused to be on camera.

"We worked around him," says Fandetti, who also remembers another student with a "cheat sheet" during an exam, which he picked up pretty readily with the camera. "We called the supervisor," says Campbell.

"I have to be on the ball," says Fandetti.

"Vin knows when I need to explain something to the students. He watches the monitor and he knows," says Campbell.

Fandetti never did radio broadcasting or made a living with a camera, but now he's doing both.

"Besides that, I'm learning Russian," he says.

If you know someone who has an unusual vocation or avocation or came to his or her job via a unique route, please contact Claudia Van Nes at 860-343-5251. Send e-mail to vannes@courant.com or write to her at The Hartford Courant, Middletown News Bureau, 373 E. Main St., Middletown, CT 06457.